As facts dribble out, we have an increasingly complete picture of what actually occurred. Mr Johnson had a grudge against Mr Steven Ercolino – a manager at a company he had worked at in the past – and had decided to lie in wait with a hand-gun and to murder him in an ambush as Mr Ercolino walked to work. As Mr. Ercolino walked towards his office from purchasing some food at a coffee shop, Mr Johnson shot him in the head from behind, and fired two more rounds into his torso, killing him.

Mr Johnson then walked away and tried to escape by blending into the crowd of similarly attired people on their way to work. However, he was trailed by a construction worker. Mr Johnson’s escape route took him past a police detail, and the construction worker trailing him alerted the officers on that detail that Mr Johnson had just murdered someone and was armed.

Two officers hustled to catch up with Mr Johnson. They challenged him. He drew (but did not fire) his weapon, and the police fired 16 rounds in quick succession into him. Bystanders were struck by police bullets, the fragments of the bullets, and fragments of masonry turned into shrapnel by the police bullets.

We at The Liberty Papers are often critical of the government and its agents, but in this case, the police appear to have handled the matter properly. The officers were approached by a citizen and made aware of a serious felony and were pointed to a suspect.

The first choice the officers faced was the question of whether or not to confront Mr. Johnson. I believe the police did the right thing in confronting him, for several reasons:

First, when people commit murders – especially when they ambush people on their way to work – it is often part of a spree killing – where a person goes to multiple locations, killing all the people they have grudges against in one go. Had police failed to confront him, who knows what would have happened, who else he might have killed? After all, Mr Jefferson had several clips on his person – despite clearly planning to fire only a few shots into his victim.

Secondly, had they tried to tail Mr Johnson, they ran the risk of losing him in the crowd. They would have had to abandon their posts to do so.

Thirdly, what if Mr Johnson was innocent and the construction worker was mistaken? In that case tailing him would have distracted police from finding the real killer.

In confronting Mr Johnson immediately after the allegations against him were communicated to them, the police officers were doing good police work.

When Mr Johnson pulled the gun out of his bag, and attempted to point it at the men confronting him, the dynamic then changed. In effect, he was committing an act of assault on people who happen to be police officers.

In shooting him, the police were defending their lives as any citizen should be able to do in a free society. In shooting that many rounds the police were not guilty of excess – people are rarely killed or incapacitated instantly by a bullet from a handgun and the police appear to stop firing almost instantly after Mr Johnson dropped his gun and flopped down to the pavement. I judge what I see in the video to be a legitimate act of self-defence by the officers.

The person guilty of depraved indifference in this affair is Mr Johnson, who chose to ambush and murder someone on a crowded sidewalk and to initiate a gun-fight on another crowded side-walk. We will never know what Mr Johnson intended to accomplish when he set out to murder Mr. Ercolino, whether he had other people in his sights, or what made him snap. Those secrets died with him as he lay hand-cuffed, face down, on the pavement. In the end, though, the responsibility for the carnage falls squarely on his shoulders.

In all likelihood, this case will be picked over for what people could have done differently. Certainly, the accuracy of the police fire, their training, and their doctrine for confronting people like Mr Johnson should be reexamined for possible improvements. But, at this point, it appears that the police made the correct decisions to confront and then shoot Mr Johnson, despite how awfully everything turned out.

I’ve officially lost count of the number of times I’ve heard or read a media source assert that Operation Fast and Furious was botched. It wasn’t. It did exactly what it was designed to do: put American guns in the hands of criminals so they could terrorize and kill innocent Mexicans with them and get caught doing so. When they were caught, the guns would be traced back to American gun shops “proving” that smuggling was a huge problem that had to be solved by any means necessary.

Were it not for the whistleblowers, the Obama administration would have built a gun control propaganda campaign upon a pile of dead bodies–exactly has they had planned to. Every single dead body was the result of things going right in the operation, not wrong.

So, why is the media continuing to insist that it was botched? Simple. It allows them to keep the truth of the Republican investigation out of the narrative. They can frame the investigation as looking into a mistake, like so many others. In reality, it’s an investigation looking at the administration’s clear intent to sacrifice innocent and unwilling lives for its own political agenda.

When you hear the word botched, know that it’s an attempt to weave a tale of incompetence when the real story is one of evil.

Today, I had the joy of observing an officer of the Newton Police force take a bad situation and make it worse. The incident showed much that is wrong in the relationship between the common citizen and the government that is there to protect him or her. An elderly person had fallen and a police officer detained her, kept her on a brick side-walk so that EMT’s from an unwanted ambulance could check her out, an operation that blocked traffic and slowed it to a crawl on a major thoroughfare. » Read more

Meet Democrat presidential candidate Vermin Supreme. The man wears a boot on his head, advocates a mandatory dental hygiene program, ponies for every American, and harnessing the energy of zombies to wean America off of foreign oil. Best of all, in his closing statement (following his singing!), Vermin tries to turn his political rival Randall Terry gay because Jesus told him to.

Just last week, a “pro-family” group that calls itself “The Family Leader” laid out a 14 point “Marriage Vow” pledge for G.O.P. presidential primary candidates to sign as a condition of being considered for an endorsement from the organization. Among the more troubling points of this pledge, at least for those of us who care about limited government and individual liberty: vow support for the Defense of Marriage Act and oppose any redefinition of marriage, “steadfast embrace” of a Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would “protect” the definition of marriage in all states as “one man and one woman” and “Humane protection of women” from “all forms” of pornography. Another point of the pledge reads “Rejection of Sharia Islam and all other anti-woman, anti-human rights forms of totalitarian control” which I find quite ironic in that many of the 14 bullet points would be almost perfectly in sync with Sharia Islamic law.

In the introduction to the pledge, there was language that suggested that black families were better off during slavery and more likely to be families that included both a mother and a father than “after the election of the USA’s first African-American president.” This language was later struck from the document that included the pledge.

Government should not be involved in the bedrooms of consenting adults. I have always been a strong advocate of liberty and freedom from unnecessary government intervention into our lives. The freedoms that our forefathers fought for in this country are sacred and must be preserved. The Republican Party cannot be sidetracked into discussing these morally judgmental issues — such a discussion is simply wrongheaded. We need to maintain our position as the party of efficient government management and the watchdogs of the “public’s pocket book”.

This is exactly what this so-called marriage vow is: a distraction. The Tea Party movement was successful in the 2010 elections because the focus was on the economy, limited government, and liberty NOT divisive social issues.

Gov. Johnson continues:

This ‘pledge’ is nothing short of a promise to discriminate against everyone who makes a personal choice that doesn’t fit into a particular definition of ‘virtue’.

While the Family Leader pledge covers just about every other so-called virtue they can think of, the one that is conspicuously missing is tolerance. In one concise document, they manage to condemn gays, single parents, single individuals, divorcees, Muslims, gays in the military, unmarried couples, women who choose to have abortions, and everyone else who doesn’t fit in a Norman Rockwell painting.

Maybe The Family Leader has done as all a huge favor? By pressuring candidates to sign the pledge in hopes of receiving The Family Leader’s precious endorsement, those of us who want to have some idea of how serious these candidates are about limited government and freedom now have a litmus test of sorts. Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum receive an F, Jon Huntsman and Newt Gingrich maybe a B, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul an A, and Gary Johnson an A+. The rest who have yet to respond get incompletes.

Obviously, for so-called values voters, the grades would be awarded in the opposite way (i.e. Johnson gets an F and Bachmann an A+). This pledge exposes the divide within the Republican Party and the battle for the party’s soul. Will G.O.P. primary voters nominate someone who will welcome individuals (especially independents) who aren’t necessarily found in a Norman Rockwell painting or will they once again nominate someone who panders primarily to white Christian men who want to tell you what to do in your bedroom?

If they win, we might as well get used to the idea of 4 more years of President Barack Obama.